Feminist Perspectives on the Self

The topic of the self has long been salient in feminist philosophy,
for it is pivotal to questions about personhood, identity, the body,
and agency that feminism must address. In some respects, Simone de
Beauvoir's trenchant observation, “He is the Subject, he is the
Absolute—she is the Other,” sums up why the self is such an
important issue for feminism. To be the Other is to be the
non-subject, the non-person, the non-agent—in short, the mere
body. In law, in customary practice, and in cultural stereotypes,
women's selfhood has been systematically subordinated, diminished, and
belittled, when it has not been outright denied. Since women have been
cast as lesser forms of the masculine individual, the paradigm of the
self that has gained ascendancy in U.S. popular culture and in Western
philosophy is derived from the experience of the predominantly white
and heterosexual, mostly economically advantaged men who have wielded
social, economic, and political power and who have dominated the arts,
literature, the media, and scholarship. Responding to this state of
affairs, feminist philosophical work on the self has taken three main
tacks: (1) critique of established views of the self, (2) reclamation
of women's selfhood, and (3) reconceptualization of the self to
incorporate women's experience. This entry will survey feminist
perspectives on the self from all three of these angles.

Two views of the self have been prominent in contemporary
Anglo-American moral and political philosophy—a Kantian
ethical subject and homo economicus. Both of these conceptions see the
individual as a free and rational chooser and actor—an
autonomous agent. Nevertheless, they differ in their emphasis. The
Kantian ethical subject uses reason to transcend cultural norms and to
discover absolute moral truth, whereas homo economicus uses reason to
rank desires in a coherent order and to figure out how to maximize
desire satisfaction. Whether the self is identified with pure abstract
reason or with the instrumental rationality of the marketplace,
though, these conceptions of the self isolate the individual from
personal relationships and larger social forces. For the Kantian
ethical subject, emotional bonds and social conventions imperil
objectivity and undermine commitment to duty. For homo economicus, it
makes no difference what social forces shape one's desires provided
they do not result from coercion or fraud, and one's ties to other
people are to be factored into one's calculations and planning along
with the rest of one's desires. Some feminist philosophers modify and
defend these conceptions of the self. But their decontextualized
individualism and their privileging of reason over other capacities
trouble many feminist philosophers.

Twentieth century philosophy's regnant conceptions of the self
minimize the personal and moral import of unchosen circumstances and
interpersonal relationships. They eclipse family, friendship,
passionate love, and community, and they downplay the difficulty of
resolving conflicts that arise between these commitments and personal
values and aspirations. Since dependency is dismissed as a defective
form of selfhood, caregiving responsibilities vanish along with
children, the disabled, and the frail elderly. Prevailing conceptions
of the self ignore the multiple, sometimes fractious sources of social
identity constituted by one's gender, sexual orientation, race, class,
age, ethnicity, and so forth. Structural domination and subordination
do not penetrate the “inner citadel” of selfhood. Likewise, these
conceptions deny the complexity of the intrapsychic world of
unconscious fantasies, fears, and desires, and they overlook the ways
in which such materials intrude upon conscious life. The
homogenized—you might say sterilized—rational subject is
not prey to ambivalence, anxiety, obsession, prejudice, hatred, or
violence. A disembodied mind, the body is peripheral—a source of
desires for homo economicus to weigh and a distracting temptation for
the Kantian ethical subject. Age, looks, sexuality, and physical
competencies are extraneous to the self. As valuable as the capacities
for rational analysis and free choice undoubtedly are, it is hard to
believe that there is nothing more to the self.

Feminist philosophers have charged that these views are, at best,
incomplete and, at worst, fundamentally misleading. Many feminist
critiques take the question of who provides the paradigm for these
conceptions as their point of departure. Who models this free,
rational self? Although represented as genderless, sexless, raceless,
ageless, and classless, feminists argue that the Kantian ethical
subject and homo economicus mask a white, healthy, youthfully
middle-aged, middleclass, heterosexual MAN. He is pictured in two
principle roles—as an impartial judge or legislator reflecting
on principles and deliberating about policies and as a self-interested
bargainer and contractor wheeling and dealing in the marketplace. It
is no accident that politics and commerce are both domains from which
women have historically been excluded. It is no accident either that
the philosophers who originated these views of the self typically
endorsed this exclusion. Deeming women emotional and unprincipled,
these thinkers advocated confining women to the domestic sphere where
their vices could be neutralized, even transformed into virtues, in
the role of submissive wife and nurturant mother.

Feminist critics point out, furthermore, that this misogynist heritage
cannot be remedied simply by condemning these traditional constraints
and advocating equal rights for women, for these conceptions of the
self are themselves gendered. In western culture, the mind and reason
are coded masculine, whereas the body and emotion are coded feminine
(Lloyd 1992). To identify the self with the rational mind is, then, to
masculinize the self. If selfhood is not impossible for women, it is
only because they resemble men in certain essential
respects—they are not altogether devoid of rational will. Yet,
feminine selves are necessarily deficient, for they only mimic and
approximate the masculine ideal.

Problematic, as well, is the way in which these gendered conceptions
of the self contribute to the valorization of the masculine and the
stigmatization of the feminine. The masculine realm of rational
selfhood is a realm of moral decency—principled respect for
others and conscientious fidelity to duty—and of prudent good
sense—adherence to shrewd, fulfilling, long-range life
plans. However, femininity is associated with emotionally rooted
concern for family and friends that spawns favoritism and compromises
principles. Likewise, femininity is associated with immersion in
unpredictable domestic exigencies that forever jeopardize the
best-laid plans and often necessitate resorting to hasty retreats or
charting new directions. By comparison, the masculinized self appears
to be a sturdy fortress of integrity. How flattering! The self is
essentially masculine, and the masculine self is essentially good and
wise.

Feminists object that this philosophical consolidation of the
preeminence of the masculine over the feminine rests on untenable
assumptions about the transparency of the self, the immunity of the
self to noxious social influences, and the reliability of reason as a
corrective to distorted moral judgment. Today people grow up in social
environments in which culturally normative prejudice persists, even in
communities where overt forms of bigotry are strictly proscribed
(Meyers 1994). Although official cultural norms uphold the values of
equality and tolerance, cultures continue to transmit camouflaged
messages of the inferiority of historically subordinated social groups
through stereotypes and other imagery. These deeply ingrained schemas
commonly structure attitudes, perception, and judgment despite the
individual's conscious good will (Valian 1998). As a result, people
often consider themselves objective and fair, and yet they
systematically discriminate against “different” others while favoring
members of their own social group (Piper 1990; Young 1990). Fortified
by culture and ensconced in the unconscious, such prejudice cannot be
dispelled through rational reflection alone (Meyers 1994). In effect,
then, the Kantian moral subject countenances “innocent” wrongdoing and
occluded reinforcement of the social stratification that privileges
the minority of men whom this conception takes as paradigmatic.

These oversights necessitate reconceptualizing the self in two
respects. To account for the residual potency of this form of
prejudice, feminists urge, the self must be understood as socially
situated and murkily heterogeneous. To account for the self's ability
to discern and resist culturally normative prejudice, the moral
subject must not be reduced to the capacity for reason.

Complementing this line of argument, a number of feminists argue that
conceptualizing the self as a seamless whole has invidious social
consequences. To realize this ideal, it is necessary to repress inner
diversity and conflict and to police the boundaries of the purified
self. Alien desires and impulses are consigned to the unconscious, but
this unconscious material inevitably intrudes upon conscious life and
influences people's attitudes and desires. In particular, the feared
and despised Other within is projected onto “other” social groups, and
hatred and contempt are redirected at these imagined enemies (Scheman
1993; Kristeva 1991). Misogyny and other forms of bigotry are thus
borne of the demand that the self be unitary together with the
impossibility of meeting this demand. Worse still, these irrational
hatreds cannot be cured unless this demand is repudiated, but to
repudiate this demand is to be resigned to a degraded, feminized self.
Far from functioning as the guarantor of moral probity, the Kantian
moral subject is the condition of the possibility of intractable
animosity and injustice.

Another strand of feminist critique targets homo economicus's
preoccupation with independence and planning. In an eery suspension of
biological reality, selves are conceived as sufficient unto
themselves. No one seems to be born and raised, for birth mothers and
caregivers are driven offstage (Baier 1987; Code 1987; Held 1987;
Benhabib 1987; Kittay 1999). The self appears to materialize on its
own, endowed with a starter set of basic desires, ready to select
additional desires and construct overarching goals, and skilled in
performing instrumental rationality tasks. No one's powers ever seem
to deteriorate either, for time is suspended along with biology. Since
dependency is denied, no morally significant preconsensual or
nonconsensual entanglements at the beginning or the end of life need
be acknowledged. All affiliations are to be freely chosen, and all
transactions are to be freely negotiated. The repudiation of feminine
caregiving underwrites the illusion of independence, and the illusion
of independence underwrites homo economicus's voluntarism.

To achieve maximal fulfillment, homo economicus must organize his
chosen pursuits into a rational life plan. He must decide which
desires are most urgent; he must ensure that his desires are
co-satisfiable; and he must ascertain the most efficient way to
satisfy this set of desires. Madcap spontaneity and seat-of-the-pants
improvisation are registered as defeats for “The Man with the Plan.”
Not only is this vision of a life governed by a self-chosen plan
distinctly middleclass, it is gendered (Addelson 1994; Walker
1999). The mother coping with the vagaries of early childhood and the
wife accommodating her man's plan are the antitheses of this
conception of the self. Uncertain of where they are ultimately headed
and seldom sure how to achieve the goals they embrace as they go
along, these women violate norms of selfhood. Ironically, middleclass
men who grow old also have difficulty measuring up to homo
economicus's standards of control. Unable to count on continued health
and vigor, unable to anticipate the onset of serious disease or
disabling conditions, unable finally to outwit the grim reaper,
affluent elderly men violate norms of selfhood along with women and
the poor. The price of denying the relationality of the self and
idolizing rational self-regulation is that full selfhood eludes all
but a lucky, albeit transitory, male elite.

A further problem with this view from a feminist standpoint is that it
fails to furnish an adequate account of internalized oppression and
the process of overcoming it. It is common for women to comport
themselves in a feminine fashion, to scale down their aspirations, and
to embrace gender-compliant goals (Bartky 1990; Babbitt 1993).
Feminists account for this phenomenon by explaining that women
internalize patriarchal values and norms—that is, these
pernicious values and norms become integrated in the cognitive,
emotional, and conative structure of the self. Once embedded in a
woman's psychic economy, internalized oppression conditions her
desires. To maximize satisfaction of her desires, then, would be to
collaborate in her own oppression. Paradoxically, the more completely
she fulfills these desires, the worse off she becomes. Advantaged as
he is, homo economicus can safely accept his desires as given and
proceed without ado to orchestrate a plan to satisfy them. But women
and members of other subordinated groups can ill-afford such
complacency, and homo economicus's instrumental reason is too
superficial a form of mastery to serve their interests (Babbitt
1993). They need a conception of the self that renders emancipatory
transformation of one's values and projects intelligible.

Feminist critique exposes the partiality of the ostensibly universal
Kantian ethical subject and homo economicus. These conceptions of the
self are: 1) androcentric because they replicate masculine stereotypes
and ideals; 2) sexist because they demean anything that smacks of the
feminine; and 3) masculinist because they help to perpetuate male
dominance. I leave the heterosexist, racist, ethnocentric, ableist,
and classist dimensions of these conceptions to other encyclopedia
articles.

Feminist critiques, we have seen, accuse regnant philosophical
accounts of masculinizing the self. One corollary of this masculinized
view of selfhood is that women are consigned to
selflessness—that is, to invisibility, subservient passivity,
and self-sacrificial altruism.

This nullification of women's selfhood was once explicitly codified in
law. The legal doctrine of coverture held that a woman's personhood
was absorbed into that of her husband when she married (McDonagh
1996). The wife's assuming her husband's surname symbolizes this
revocation of her separate identity. In addition, coverture deprived
the wife of her right to bodily integrity, for rape within marriage
was not recognized as a crime, nor was it illegal for a husband to
beat his wife. She lost her right to property, as well, for her
husband was entitled to control her earnings, and she was barred from
making contracts in her own name. Lacking the right to vote or to
serve on juries, she was a second-class citizen whose enfranchised
husband purportedly represented her politically.

Although coverture has been rescinded, vestiges of this denial of
women's selfhood can be discerned in recent legal rulings, and the
doctrine remains influential in culture. For example, pregnant women
remain vulnerable to legally sanctioned violations of their right to
bodily integrity. Courts have forced pregnant women to submit to
invasive medical procedures for the sake of the fetuses they were
carrying, although no court would compel any other woman or man to
undergo comparable procedures for the sake of a living individual,
including a family member (Bordo 1993). Selflessness remains the
pregnant woman's legal status. Moreover, the stereotype of feminine
selflessness still thrives in the popular imagination. Any
self-confident, self-assertive woman is out of step with prevalent
gender norms, and a mother who is not unstintingly devoted to her
children is likely to be perceived as selfish and face severe social
censure. Despite the fact that it is no longer legally mandatory for
wives to give up their maiden names, many women adhere to this custom
and perpetuate this traditional gesture of self-renunciation.

A tension within feminism complicates the project of reclaiming
women's selfhood, however. The claim that women are systematically
subordinated and that this subordination has a grievous impact on
women's lives is central to feminism. Yet, this key insight seems to
belie the claim that women's selfhood and agency have been overlooked.
To be unjustly subordinated, it would seem, is to be diminished in
one's selfhood and to have one's agency curtailed. Otherwise, what's
the harm?

Some feminists have endorsed this very position. Arguing that moral
virtues have no gender, Mary Wollstonecraft regards “feminine” virtues
as perversions of true human virtues and laments women's conscription
into a bogus ideal (Wollstonecraft 1792). Similarly but more vividly,
Simone de Beauvoir labels women “mutilated” and “immanent” (Beauvoir
1952). Socialized to objectify themselves, women become narcissistic,
small-minded, and dependent on others' approval. Excluded from
careers, waiting to be chosen by their future husbands, taken over by
natural forces during pregnancy, busy with tedious, repetitive
housework, women never become transcendent agents. Indeed, they are
content not to assume the burden of responsibility for their own
freedom. Cast in the role of man's Other and at the mercy of feminine
vices, women succumb to bad faith and surrender their agency.

This portrayal of women as abject victims has been challenged and
modulated in contemporary feminist philosophy. I shall review four
major reclamation strategies: 1) rethinking the activities of
mothering, 2) developing an ethic of care, 3) exploring separatist
practices, and 4) reconceiving autonomy.

The conventional view of pregnancy and birth classifies them as merely
biological processes, and the conventional view of mothering
classifies it as a merely instinctual activity. Feminists demonstrate
that these assessments are sorely mistaken. Both pregnancy and
birthgiving engage women's agentic powers. Not only does pregnancy
raise the question of whether to have an abortion, but also a woman's
decision to proceed with a pregnancy entails learning to care for
herself in previously unnecessary ways (Held 1989). In the last few
decades, medical technologies, such as sonography and fetal surgery,
have raised new issues for pregnant women and sometimes confront them
with wrenching choices that test their agentic resilience. Arguably,
routine pregnancy and birthgiving mobilize specific agentic
capacities, such as “active waiting” and coping with “chosen and
predictable pain” (Ruddick 1994).

A related feminist innovation focuses on analyzing the discipline of
mothering to grasp its aims, its forms of thought, its ideal form, and
its characteristic values and disvalues (Ruddick 1989). Caring for a
child imposes a set of demands—for preservation (survival),
for growth (development into a healthy adult), and for acceptability
(enculturation that ensures fitting into a community). Meeting these
demands involves a range of activities that are governed by a
distinctive set of values: protecting a fragile existence,
acknowledging the limits of one's power and the unpredictability of
events, cheerful determination to persist despite setbacks, responsive
adaptability, sensitivity to the child's subjective viewpoint, and
tolerance for inconclusive processes of disclosure. Although the
practice of mothering places no premium on independence,
self-interest, free choice, power, advance planning, or control, it
clearly calls upon a wide range of interpersonal and reflective skills
and enlists caregivers' agentic capacities. Dumb instinct hardly
suffices for good childcare.

Like feminists who have reclaimed women's agency as mothers, feminists
who have developed different versions of care ethics insist on taking
women's experience seriously and use this experience as a basis for
new approaches to morality and social policy. The aim of the
psychological studies that first made the voice of care audible was to
recognize and understand the capacities for moral judgment of women
whose competency had been underrated. Previous research comparing
boys' and girls' moral development had concluded that girls'
development was stunted, but Carol Gilligan argues that this
assessment misconstrued the data (Gilligan 1982). According to
Gilligan, there are two paths of moral development. Many girls and
women but almost no men follow the care trajectory (Gilligan
1987). Since earlier investigations first studied U.S. boys and men
and used these interviews to generalize about people's moral
development, researchers noticed only one path, namely, the justice
trajectory. By repudiating the assumption that the masculine is the
human norm and by studying girls and women, Gilligan discovered an
alternative mode of moral cognition—the Care
Perspective. Constituted by a distinctive set of framing concepts and
a distinctive set of reflective skills, the morality of care is not
translatable into the morality of justice that Gilligan's predecessors
had taken to be the gauge of moral development. The Care Perspective,
in Gilligan's view, is a different and equally good way to interpret
moral situations and to decide how to act. Moreover, by noticing this
alternative, we are able to recognize women's moral agency and defend
women against the age-old charge that they are morally inferior to
men.

Although some feminist philosophers criticize Gilligan's
investigations on empirical or philosophical grounds (Moody-Adams
1991; Friedman 1993; Card 1996; Fraser and Nicholson 1990), her
research prompted a number of feminist philosophers to develop moral
theories marked by quite different emphases from those of traditional
moral theories. The theme of human interconnectedness and the value of
intersubjectivity are prominent in contemporary feminist moral
philosophy. A climate of trust forms an indispensable background for
all sorts of undertakings, but no voluntaristic ethic can account for
trust (Baier 1986). The ability to empathize with other individuals
and imaginatively reconstruct their unique subjective viewpoints is
vital to moral insight and wise moral choice, but ethics that base
moral judgment on a universal conception of the person marginalize
this skill (Meyers 1994). By developing narratives of one's moral
identity, one's relationships, and one's values and sharing those
narratives with one's associates, one endows one's life with moral
meaning and integrity, but rationalistic ethics overlook this process
of self-disclosure and interpersonal mediation (Walker 1998). Taking
responsibility for who one is and how one shall respond is a salient
feature of informal personal relationships, yet justice oriented
ethics focus exclusively on being held responsible for what one has
done and the credit or blame one's actions may deserve (Card
1996). Appreciating the inevitability of dependency and the need for
care demonstrates the poverty of conceiving justice exclusively in
terms of rights not to be interfered with and the urgency of
developing a theory of justice that includes provisions for care
(Kittay 1999). In each instance, feminist moral theorists revalue that
which is traditionally deemed feminine—feeling, intimacy,
nurturance, and so forth. By highlighting these contexts and values,
they reclaim the venues traditionally associated with women as morally
significant sites, and they reclaim the moral agency of the
individuals whose lives are centered in these sites.

A third approach to reclaiming women's agency spotlights several types
of separatist practice—including friendship among women,
lesbianism, support groups for rape victims and battered women, and
women's consciousness raising and activist groups. Establishing and
maintaining such affiliations presupposes self-willed defiance of
norms of heterosexual fidelity and familial commitment. Thus, the very
existence of these relationships testifies to women's awareness of
their own needs and their capacity to act on them despite a repressive
social context. Moreover, noting that unchosen relationships and
communities of origin often prove oppressive to women and inimical to
their agency, some feminists stress that it is important not to
underestimate the role of chosen relationships and communities as
sites of women's agency (Friedman 1993; Brison 1997; Hoagland 1988;
Ferguson 1987; Frye 1983; MacKinnon 1982; Hartsock 1983). By cordoning
off a social sphere of mutually attuned, mutually concerned women,
separatism in all its forms turns down the racket of
patriarchy. Separatist associations provide forums in which women can
exchange personal confidences, secure in the knowledge that other
participants will empathize with their dissatisfactions and
frustrations as well as their joys and triumphs and that others will
be receptive to their worries and complaints. Isolation often
confounds women's subjectivity and agency, for in isolation their
problems appear to be personal failings if not pathologies. Separatism
overcomes isolation. It affords women the opportunity to develop
language that makes sense of their anomalous experience and that
restores their self-esteem together with the opportunity to reflect on
the social meanings of their experience. Within separatist contexts,
women find support for their resistance to social norms and their
struggles to overcome personal privations or pressures.

Separatist practices relieve women of the burden of Otherness. Each
woman is an equal among equals. Each woman's subjectivity and agency
are affirmed. Thus, feminist philosophers seek not only to chronicle
the ways in which women have created pockets of separatism within
patriarchal systems but also to theorize the forms of subjectivity and
agency that flourish in these sites.

Autonomy is a key issue for this theoretical project. Although some
feminists dismiss autonomy as an androcentric relic of modernism
(Jaggar 1983; Addelson 1994; Hekman 1995; Card 1996), others assert
women's need for self-determination (de Lauretis 1986; King 1988;
Lugones and Spelman 1983; Govier 1993). In light of the history of
figuring women as driven by their reproductive biology and in need of
rational male guidance and the history of women's enforced economic
dependence on men or relegation to poorly paid, often despised forms
of labor, feminists can hardly ignore the topic of self-determination.
Thus, a number of feminist philosophers take up this challenge and
present accounts of autonomy that do not devalue the interpersonal
capacities and social contributions that are conventionally coded
feminine (Nedelsky 1989; Meyers 1989 and 2000; Benhabib 1995 and 1999;
Weir 1995). In feminist accounts, autonomy is not conflated with
self-sufficiency and free will, but rather it is seen to be
facilitated by supportive relationships and also to be a matter of
degree.

Feminist accounts of autonomy strike a balance between recognizing the
injury that subordination does to women's sense of self and agency and
respecting the measure of autonomy women gain despite this
subjugation. Subordination endangers women's autonomy in a number of
ways. Not only does internalized oppression mold women's desires and
alienate them from themselves, but also those in subordinate positions
are offered all sorts of incentives to minimize friction and ease
their lot by placating those with power (Card 1996). Likewise,
well-meaning friends are all too likely to counsel the course of least
resistance, namely, compliance with convention regardless of one's
personal values and aspirations. Another effect of systematic
subordination is that women's autonomy skills may be poorly developed
or poorly coordinated, and exercising these skills is rarely rewarded
and generally discouraged (Meyers 1989). Deficient autonomy skills
compound the threat internalized oppression poses.

Still, feminist accounts of autonomy enable us to understand why women
do not completely lack autonomy and how women's autonomy can be
augmented. The self-discovery, self-definition, and self-direction
skills that secure autonomy are commonplace (Meyers 1989). Indeed,
some of them,such as introspective attunement to feelings and
receptiveness to others' feedback, are gender-compatible for and often
promoted in women. Although others, such as rational planning and
self-assertion, are coded masculine, many women in fact have
considerable proficiency in these areas. All too often, however, they
exercise these skills only in narrowly restricted, gender-appropriate
contexts. For example, a homemaker may demonstrate remarkable
instrumental reason skills in running her household, or a mother may
exhibit effective self-assertion skills in dealing with a teacher who
has mistreated her child. Yet, these women may come off as inept,
helpless, and meek in other situations. Thus, augmenting women's
autonomy is often a matter of emboldening women to extend the range of
application of their existing autonomy skills and fostering the
development of weak skills. It is evident, then, why separatist
practices of various kinds are conducive to women's autonomy. By
inviting women to marshall their autonomy skills and reinforcing
women's determination to carry out their decisions, they function as
autonomy workshops.

Still, from a feminist perspective, separatist practices are merely
transitional and ameliorative. In addition, the patriarchal social
structures that relentlessly undermine women's autonomy must be
changed, and women's selfhood and agency must be legally and
culturally affirmed. Thus, feminist philosophers defend a variety of
social policy initiatives that expand the scope of women's choices and
that respect women as self-directing individuals. Feminist
philosophers have been in the forefront in arguing for egalitarian
families, in legitimating economic opportunity for women, in opposing
harassment of women in workplaces, in defending women's reproductive
rights, and in condemning violence against women in all its forms. In
each instance, greater justice for women strikes a blow against the
masculinized self of traditional philosophy by securing greater social
recognition for the female agentic self.

The primary task of a philosophy of the self is to clarify what makes
something a self. Feminist philosophers are acutely aware that this is
not a value-free task. To get an analysis of the nature of the self
off the ground, one must decide which entities count as selves (or, at
least, which entities are noncontroversially counted as selves within
one's linguistic community). Since we regard selves as
valuable—as members of our moral community and as worthy of
respect—these judgments are in part judgments about which
entities are valuable. Moreover, values enter into these judgments
because we consider selves to be the sorts of things that can achieve
(or fail to achieve) ideals of selfhood. Thus, philosophical accounts
of the self have implications for conceptions of what it is to lead a
good life. As we have seen, many feminist philosophers argue that it
is a mistake to hold that rationality alone is essential to the self
and that the ideal self is transparent, unified, coherent, and
independent, for they discern misogynist subtexts in the atomistic
individualism of the Kantian ethical subject and homo economicus (see
Section 1). It is incumbent on feminist philosophers, then, to develop
more satisfactory accounts of the self—accounts that are
compatible with respect for women. Thus, a number of feminist
philosophers propose reconstructions of alternative theories of the
nature of the self.

Three traditions have been especially influential in recent feminist
thought—classic psychoanalysis, object relations theory, and
poststructuralism. Feminist philosophers gravitate toward these
approaches to understanding selfhood because they do not share the
drawbacks that prompt feminist critique of the Kantian ethical subject
and homo economicus. None of these approaches regards the self as
homogeneous or transparent; none supposes that a self should be
coherent and speak in a single voice; none removes the self from its
cultural or interpersonal setting; n one sidelines the body. In
appropriating these views, feminists bring out their implications in
regard to gender, incorporate feminist insights into these theories,
and modify the theories to address feminist concerns.

Julia Kristeva transposes the classic Freudian conception of the self
and the distinction between consciousness and the unconscious into an
explicitly gendered discursive framework (Kristeva 1980). For
Kristeva, the self is a subject of enunciation—a speaker who can
use the pronoun ‘I’. But speakers are not unitary, nor are
they fully in control of what they say because discourse is
bifurcated. The symbolic dimension of language, which is characterized
by referential signs and linear logic, corresponds to consciousness
and control. The clear, dry prose of scientific research reports
epitomizes symbolic discourse. The semiotic dimension of language,
which is characterized by figurative language, cadences, and
intonations, corresponds to the unruly, passion-fueled
unconscious. The ambiguities and nonstandard usages of poetry
epitomize semiotic discourse. These paradigms notwithstanding,
Kristeva maintains that all discourse combines elements of both
registers. Every intelligible utterance relies on semantic
conventions, and every utterance has a tone, even if it is a dull
monotone. This contention connects Kristeva's account to feminist
concerns about gender and the self. Since the rational orderliness of
the symbolic is culturally coded masculine while the affect-laden
allure of the semiotic is culturally coded feminine, it follows that
no discourse is purely masculine or purely feminine. The masculine
symbolic and the feminine semiotic are equally indispensable to the
speaking subject, whatever this individual's socially assigned gender
may be. It is not possible, then, to be an unsulliedly masculine self
or an unsulliedly feminine self. Every subject of
enunciation—every self—amalgamates masculine and feminine
discursive modalities.

Like the unconscious in classic psychoanalytic theory, the semiotic
decenters the self. One may try to express one's thoughts in definite,
straightforward language, yet because of the semiotic aspects of one's
utterances, what one says carries no single meaning and is amenable to
being interpreted in more than one way. In Kristeva's view, this is
all to the good, for accessing the semiotic—that which is
conveyed, often inadvertently, by the style of an
utterance—kindles social critique. The semiotic gives expression
to repressed, unconscious material. According to Kristeva, what
society systematically represses provides clues to what is oppressive
about society and how society needs to be changed. Thus, she discerns
a vital ethical potential in the semiotic (Kristeva 1987). Since this
ethical potential is explicitly linked to the feminine, moreover,
Kristeva's account of the self displaces “masculine” adherence to
principle as the prime mode of ethical agency and recognizes the
urgent need for a “feminine” ethical approach. Viewing the self as a
“questionable-subject-in-process”—a subject who is responsive to
the encroachments of semiotic material into conscious life and who is
therefore without a fixed or unitary identity—and valorizing the
dissident potential of this decentered subjectivity, Kristeva seeks to
neutralize the fear of the inchoate feminine that, in her view,
underwrites misogyny. In one respect, Nancy Chodorow's appropriation
of object relations theory parallels Kristeva's project of reclaiming
and revaluing femininity, for Chodorow's account of the relational
self reclaims and revalues feminine mothering capacities. But whereas
Kristeva focuses on challenging the homogeneous self and the bright
line between reason, on the one hand, and emotion and desire, on the
other, Chodorow focuses on challenging the self-subsisting self with
its sharp self-other boundaries. Chodorow's claim that the self is
inextricable from interpersonal relationships calls into question the
decontextualized individualism of the Kantian ethical subject and homo
economicus.

Chodorow sees the self as relational in several respects (Chodorow
1981). Every child is cared for by an adult or adults, and every
individual is shaped for better or worse by this emotionally charged
interaction. As a result of feelings of need and moments of
frustration, the infant becomes differentiated from its primary
caregiver and develops a sense of separate identity. Concomitantly, a
distinctive personality emerges. By selectively internalizing and
recombining elements of their experience with other people, children
develop characteristic traits and dispositions. Moreover, Chodorow
attributes the development of a key interpersonal capacity to
nurturance. A caregiver who is experienced as warmly solicitous is
internalized as a “good internal mother” (Chodorow 1980). Children
gain a sense of their worthiness by internalizing the nurturance they
receive and directing it toward themselves, and they learn to respect
and respond to other people by internalizing their experience of
nurturance and projecting it toward others. Whereas Kristeva
understands the self as a dynamic interplay between the feminine
semiotic and the masculine symbolic, Chodorow understands the self as
fundamentally relational and thus linked to cultural norms of feminine
interpersonal responsiveness. For Chodorow, the rigidly
differentiated, compulsively rational, stubbornly independent self is
a masculine defensive formation—a warped form of the
relational self—that develops as a result of fathers'
negligible involvement in childcare.

Feminist philosophers have noted strengths and weaknesses in both of
these views. For example, Kristeva's questionable-subject-in-process
seems to enshrine and endorse the very gender dichotomy that causes
women so much grief. Yet, Chodorow's relational self seems to glorify
weak individuation and scorn the independence and self-assertiveness
that many women desperately need. Still, Kristeva's analyses of the
psychic, social, and political potency of gender figurations
underscore the need for feminist counter-imagery to offset culturally
entrenched, patriarchal images of womanhood. And Chodorow's
appreciation of the relational self together with her diagnosis of the
damage wrought by hyperindividuation advances feminist demands for
equitable parenting practices. These contributions notwithstanding,
both of these views have come under attack for heterosexist biases as
well as for inattention to other forms of difference among women.

Critical race theorists and poststructuralists have been particularly
vocal about this failure to come to grips with the diversity of
gender, and they have offered accounts of the self designed to
accommodate difference. Poststructuralist Judith Butler maintains that
personal identity—the sense that there are answers to the
questions ‘who am I?’ and ‘what am I
like?’—is an illusion (Butler 1990). The self is merely an
unstable discursive node—a shifting confluence of multiple
discursive currents—and sexed/gendered identity is merely a
“corporeal style”—the imitation and repeated enactment of
ubiquitous norms. For Butler, psychodynamic accounts of the self,
including Kristeva's and Chodorow's, camouflage the performative
nature of the self and collaborate in the cultural conspiracy that
maintains the illusion that one has an emotionally anchored, interior
identity that is derived from one's biological nature, which is
manifest in one's genitalia. Such accounts are pernicious. In
concealing the ways in which normalizing regimes deploy power to
enforce the performative routines that construct “natural”
sexed/gendered bodies together with debased, “unnatural” bodies, they
obscure the arbitrariness of the constraints that are being imposed
and deflect resistance to these constraints. The solution, in Butler's
view, is to question the categories of biological sex, polarized
gender, and determinate sexuality that serve as markers of personal
identity, to treat the construction of identity as a site of political
contestation, and to embrace the subversive potential of unorthodox
performances and parodic identities.

African American feminists are less sanguine than poststructuralists
about the felicitous social impact of playful deviations from norms
and the laughter they may prompt (Williams 1991; Crenshaw 1993).
Nevertheless, some of them have adapted poststructuralist theory to
the purposes of critical race theory. Noting that gender, race, and
class stratification do not operate in isolation from one another but
rather interact to produce compound effects, these theorists conceive
of the individual as an intersectional subject—a site where
structures of domination and subordination converge (King 1988;
Crenshaw 1993). Intersectional theory does not purport to offer a
comprehensive theory of the self. Its aim is to capture those aspects
of selfhood that are conditioned by membership in subordinated or
privileged social groups. Accenting the liabilities of belonging to
more than one subordinated group, Kimberle Crenshaw likens the
position of such individuals to that of a pedestrian hit by several
speeding vehicles simultaneously, and Maria Lugones likens their
position to that of a stateless border-dweller who is not at home
anywhere (Crenshaw 1991; Lugones 1992). Nevertheless, some theorists
of mixed ancestry embrace border-dwelling as a model of positive
identity (Anzaldua 1987; Alcoff 1995). Moreover, proponents of the
intersectional self credit multiply oppressed people with a certain
epistemic advantage. In virtue of their suffering and alienation,
these individuals are well situated not only to discern which values
and practices in their heritage deserve allegiance but also to
identify shortcomings in the traditions of the groups to which they
belong. Thus, African American women are acutely aware of racism
within feminism and sexism within the struggle for racial
justice. Their intersectional positioning and subjectivity makes such
insight virtually unavoidable.

By and large, recent feminist philosophy of the self reflects
skepticism about modernist, unitary accounts of the self. In seeking
to remedy the androcentric biases of the latter views, feminist
philosophers emphasize features of selfhood that other philosophical
schools neglect, including intersubjectivity, heterogeneity, and
social construction. Still, some contemporary feminist philosophers
express concern that the sorts of conceptions I have sketched are
detrimental to feminist aims. Influenced by Jurgen Habermas's
communicative ethics, Seyla Benhabib refuses to join
poststructuralists in declaring the death of the autonomous,
self-reflective individual who is capable of taking responsibility and
acting on principle (Benhabib 1995). Although Benhabib is committed to
viewing people as socially situated, interpersonally bonded, and
embodied, she is also committed to the feasibility of rational
philosophical justification of universal moral norms. Moreover, she
argues that a narrative conception of the self renders the idea of a
core self and coherent identity intelligible without suppressing
difference and without insulating the self from social relations
(Benhabib 1999). Autobiographical stories can include the many voices
within us and the many relationships we have experienced, and these
stories are constantly under revision, for they are always being
contested by our associates' disparate self-narratives with their
divergent versions of events. Nevertheless, these narratives do not
collapse into incoherence, and they presuppose a core capacity to
describe and reflect on one's experience. For Benhabib, this view of
selfhood and reason is indispensable to feminist emancipatory
objectives.

Postmodern challenges to the idea of a stable self and to the
coherence of the category woman’ have sparked a lively debate
about the relation between gender and the self. If there is no such
thing as a self with persistent attributes, it seems that gender
cannot be a feature of every woman's identity. But if there is nothing
that all women have in common, it seems that there are no interests
that all women share, and there is nothing for feminism to be
about. Several feminist philosophers have proposed accounts of the
relation between gender and the self that aim to rescue feminism from
this reductio. Linda Alcoff rejects both the universalized
conceptions of gender that cultural feminists advocate and the
deconstructions of the category ‘woman’ that
poststructuralist feminists tender. Her alternative is to construe
femininity as “positionality.” Positionality has two dimensions
(Alcoff 1994). First, it is the social context that locates the
individual and that deprives her of power and mobility. Second, it is
a political point of departure—the affirmation of women's
collective right to take charge of their gendered identity. To be a
woman is, then, to be deprived of equality, and to be a feminist is to
take responsibility for redressing this wrong and for redefining the
meaning of being a woman. Alcoff salvages the category
‘woman’ by defending an interpretation of the social
meaning of being assigned to that category.

Iris Young introduces an additional layer of analysis. To explain
gender, Young invokes Jean-Paul Sartre's idea of seriality (Young
1994). A social series is “a social collective whose members are
unified passively by the objects around which their actions are
oriented or by the objectified results of the material effects of the
actions of others.” In other words, a series is constituted by a
behavior-directing, meaning-defining environment. The lives of series
members are affected by being assigned to particular social series,
for serial existence is experienced as a “felt necessity.” People feel
impelled to act in ways that are consonant with their series
memberships. Yet, series membership “does not define the person's
identity in the sense of forming his/her individual purposes,
projects, and sense of self in relation to others.” Indeed, a woman
“can choose to make none of her serial memberships important for her
sense of identity.” For Young, then, a gendered self is optional
although membership in the series ‘woman’ is not.

Sally Haslanger underscores three conceptions of ‘gender’,
and her distinctions clear up much of what seems puzzling in Alcoff's
and Young's views (Haslanger 2000). Haslanger argues in favor of a
“critical analytical” approach to gender—that is, focusing on
the “work the concepts of gender and race might do for us in a
critical—specifically feminist and antiracist—social
theory” and suggesting “concepts that can accomplish at least some
important elements of that work.” To pursue this politicized approach
to gender, it is necessary to decide which conception of gender best
serves the aims of emancipatory political theory and politics. As
Haslanger points out, feminist theorists have interpreted gender as
the experience of sexed embodiment, a broad psychological orientation
to the world, a set of internalized norms, a system of sexual
symbolism, a set of traditional roles, and a social position or
class. In her view, the principal task for feminist theory is to
provide an analysis of gender as a “pattern of social relations that
constitute the social classes of men as dominant and women as
subordinate.” The other forms of gender, including gendered identity,
should be explained in terms of this fundamental structure.

Like Alcoff and Young, Haslanger is acutely aware of the political
damage essentialist theories of gender have done—especially, the
alienation of women of color and lesbians from feminism—and also
the factual shortcomings of essentialist theories of gender—that
is, many women do not fit the proposed accounts of what it is to be a
woman. Although none of these feminist philosophers repudiates the
conception of gender as a gendered self, each treats this conception
as secondary or derivative. Alcoff politicizes gendered identity and
ties it to a self-ascribed commitment to progressive social
change. Young stresses the indeterminacy of gendered identity and
allows that women's gender-based political commitments can be
antifeminist as well as feminist. Although Haslanger insists that the
connections between gender as social class and gendered identities are
highly variable, she claims that gender “implicates each of us at the
heart of our self-understandings,” and she advocates conscientious
reflection on “who we think we are.”

Alcoff remarks that every woman's subjectivity is engendered; Young
observes that every woman's identity is marked by gender; and
Haslanger notes that every woman is invested in her gender. From the
standpoint of a feminist philosophy of the self, it is crucial to
account for this engendering, marking, and investment. In my view, the
alternative to a common homogeneous feminine identity is gendered and
individualized identities (Meyers forthcoming 2000). Individualization
does not, however, entail optionality, for gender insinuates itself
into identity in ways that we may not be conscious of and in ways that
we may not be able to change no matter how much we try. Gender is
constitutive of who we are—our personalities, our capabilities
and liabilities, our aspirations, and how we feel about all of these
attributes. Yet, there is no feature of identity that all women
share. How is this possible? Nancy Chodorow uses psychoanalytic
theory to make sense of individualized, gendered identities (Chodorow
1995). Psychoanalysis explains how individuals' affective
dispositions, unconscious fantasies, and interpersonal relationships
filter the culturally entrenched conception of gender they
encounter. Through various psychic processes—projection and
introjection together with the defense mechanisms—gender
acquires a “personal meaning” that is inspired by, but that does not
wholly replicate culturally transmitted strictures and
iconography.

It is a mistake to picture gender as a toxic capsule full of norms and
interpretive schemas that individuals swallow whole and that lodges
intact in their psychic structure. The diversity of individuals'
experience of gender belies this view. But it is also a mistake to
picture attributes like gender as systems of social and economic
opportunities, constraints, rewards, and penalties that need not
impinge upon individual identity. The seeming naturalness of enacting
gendered characteristics, the passion with which people cling to their
sense of their gender, and the intractability of many gendered
attributes when people seek to change them testify to the embeddedness
of gender in identity. Still, it is important to recognize, as Alcoff,
Young, Haslanger, and Chodorow do, that the potency of the impact of
gender on the self does not altogether deprive women of control over
their gendered attributes. Neither personal resistance to one's own
gendered dispositions and evaluative standards nor political
resistance to the social structures that gender women's identities is
ruled out on this view (See Section 2).

As this article attests, there is tremendous foment and variety within
the field of feminist work on the self. Yet, in reviewing this
literature, I have been struck by a recurrent theme—the
inextricability of metaphysical issues about the self from moral and
political theory. Feminist critiques of regnant philosophical theories
of the self expose the normative underpinnings of these theories.
Feminist analyses of women's agentic capacities both acknowledge
traditional feminine social contributions and provide accounts of how
women can overcome oppressive norms and practices. Feminist
reconstructions of the nature of the self are interwoven with
arguments that draw out the emancipatory benefits of conceiving the
self one way rather than another. There is nothing surprising, to be
sure, about the salience of normative concerns in feminist
philosophizing. Still, I mention it because I believe that feminists'
attention to political concerns leads to fresh questions and also that
asking novel questions enriches philosophical understanding of the
self. Moreover, I would urge that this forthrightness about the
political viewpoint that informs philosophy is a virtue, for
overlooking the political suppositions and implications of esoteric
philosophical views has led to considerable mischief.

In the interests of concision and readability, the present essay
mentions only some of the representative works on the feminist
literature on the self. These cited works are collated in the
Bibliography which appears in the next section of this essay. However,
the feminist literature on the self is vast. Lisa Cassidy has put
together a comprehensive bibliography of this literature; it attempts
to cite all of the books and articles that are relevant to the present
entry. This comprehensive bibliography is linked into the present
essay as the following supplementary document: